Journalist James Risen receives Hamblett Award from New England First Amendment Coalition

BOSTON — James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who faces possible prison for refusing a court’s order to reveal a source, was honored Friday by a coalition of New England journalists and other First Amendment advocates

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By
Tom Mooney
Posted Feb. 7, 2014 @ 9:45 pm

BOSTON — James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times who faces possible prison for refusing a court’s order to reveal a source, was honored Friday by a coalition of New England journalists and other First Amendment advocates.

The New England First Amendment Coalition presented Risen with the 2014 Stephen Hamblett Award at its annual luncheon, at the Park Plaza Hotel. The award is named after the late chairman, chief executive officer and publisher of The Providence Journal, who led the paper for nearly 12 years.

“There is no one anywhere on the vast landscape of American journalism who merits this award more than you do,” said Walter Robinson, a former Boston Globe reporter and director at the coalition, in introducing Risen. “Your willingness, if need be, to forgo your own freedom in defense of ours is breathtaking. It is not possible to imagine a more principled and patriotic defense of the First Amendment.”

An investigative reporter for the Times, Risen was told last year by a divided 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to identify his source and testify in the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who is charged with leaking classified information to Risen in violation of the Espionage Act.

At issue is the sourcing in a chapter of Risen’s 2006 book, “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” which told of an unsuccessful CIA operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

The appeals court’s decision reversed a 2011 ruling by a federal judge who agreed with Risen’s contention that he was shielded by a limited “reporter’s privilege” under the freedom of the press provision of the First Amendment.

Risen has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case. If the court decides in the next few months to hear the case, it will, First Amendment advocates say, address a major question that circuit courts have been unable to decide: should journalists have a legal privilege, rooted in the First Amendment, not to reveal sources when those sources are under criminal prosecution?

Risen received a standing ovation from the 270 people in attendance. Such support, he said, has sustained him and his family over the last six years since he was first subpoenaed to testify. “It’s been a long haul,” he said.

Risen described his case as just one of several leak investigations that the Obama administration was pursuing in an apparent attempt to silence reporting on national intelligence issues. All were “part of a transformation of our culture” since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that is allowing us “to become a security state” in the name of national security.

The goal of the administration, said Risen, seemed to be to “limit the awareness of the public of national security issues,” adding that the global war on terror is the first war in the nation’s history fought completely in secret.

“The government has not disclosed any significant actions” in that war, he said. It has come from journalists revealing the information.

In an affidavit filed in connection with his case, Risen wrote: “If I aided the government in its effort to prosecute my confidential source(s) for providing information to me under terms of confidentiality, I would inevitably be compromising my own ability to gather news in the future. I also believe that I would be impeding all other reporters’ ability to gather and report news in the future.”

The New England First Amendment Coalition was formed in 2006 by a group of journalists concerned that reporters and the general citizenry were being routinely denied access to the public workings of government: documents, meetings, hearings.

Risen has covered national security, intelligence and terrorism issues for the Times since 1998. He previously worked at the Los Angeles Times, the Detroit Free Press and the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. He received a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1978 and an undergraduate degree from Brown University in 1977. While at Brown, Risen was a stringer for The Providence Journal.

At The New York Times, Risen was a member of a team that won a Pulitzer in 2002 for explanatory reporting for coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks and terrorism. He shared a Pulitzer in 2006, for national coverage, with reporter Eric Lichtblau for revealing President Bush’s legally questionable domestic wiretapping program.

Risen is the fourth person to receive a Stephen Hamblett Award since the coalition introduced it in 2010. Earlier recipients were the late New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis; Martin Baron, former editor of The Boston Globe and now executive editor of The Washington Post; and Philip Balboni, GlobalPost CEO and co-founder and the architect of cable news channel NECN.

Attending the event were Jocelin Hamblett, wife of the late Journal publisher, and two of his sons, Adam and Christopher Hamblett.

The coalition also honored two others for their work supporting the First Amendment:

Kit Savage, who fought the Darien, Conn., school system and the state board of education for public records and proper services for her two disabled children. She won the Antonia Orfield Citizenship Award.

Brent Curtis, a reporter at the Rutland Herald in Vermont, and members of the newspaper staff won the Freedom of Information Award for their investigation into members of the Rutland Police Department who were downloading pornography on work computers.

Risen said after the luncheon that he certainly isn’t looking forward to going to prison, but that he has two choices: “Give up everything I believe in, or go to jail.”